Tilera announces 36 core processor availability

Tilera has announced the availability of its new 36-core processor, which it claims can wipe the floor with x86 server chips at least in terms of performance-per-watt.

Dubbed the Tile-GX36, the chip is designed for use in servers that handle large volumes of internet transactions.

It is supposed to reduce power and cooling costs in data centres while improving social media, search and multimedia streaming transactions.

It will ship at clock speeds of 1.2GHz, and draws up to 24 watts of power, with higher performing chips available in the future.

Tilera’s director of marketing, Bob Doud, told PC World the chip can run more operations per clock cycle while drawing less power than some power-hungry IntelXeon server chips.

On paper, the Tilera chip has attributes of a general-purpose CPU and can run Linux and web data software. It has fewer parallelised cores but is faster than Tilera’s 64-core predecessor chip which has been on the market for a few years. A 2U server with eight 36-core chips will draw roughly 400 watts of power, the same as eight Tilera 64-core chips in the box.

Doud said that a Gx36 has a lot more cache so it cranks out more work per core.

Although the spinning seemed to be targeting Intel, Tilera’s main rival is ARM. Doud said that while ARM may have more name recognition, Tilera has a more powerful chip with 64-bit capabilities.

Current ARM processors are only 32-bit and the fact that there is a buzz about ARM helps Tilera flog its more useful 64-bit chips.